Jo Linsdell

Showing posts with label Twitter for authors. Show all posts

If you're on Twitter (which I hope you are because it's awesome), you'll probably have used Twitter search at some point. It's that little box on the top right of the navigation bar at the top of the screen. You might not be using it to its full potential though.

Sure it's great for finding your friends, and yes, it works wonderfully for finding hashtags, but it is so much more than that.

Go deeper with Advanced search.

You can just type in your keywords in the search box...

...but Advanced Search gives you much more.

How it works:

Type in your basic search term in the search box and open the results page. Then click on "More options" and scroll down to select "Advanced Search" (it's down at the bottom)

This will bring up the Advance Search page where you can get more specific with your search. You can also hop straight over to https://twitter.com/search-advanced but I thought it might be useful for you to know the long way to find it too ;)

Anyway, this is the Advanced Search page.

Here you can add in multiple search terms (something I often do to save time). For example, I type in words like "writing", "book", and "marketing" in the "Any of these words" box. Twitter will then show me all the tweets with any of these words.

One thing I love about Twitter search is that you can save your searches to use again in the future. This saves you having to type in your search info next time round as you can then just select from your saved searches.

To save a search, open your search term results and click on "More options" and then "Save this search". It will then be added to your saved searches list.

So now you're clued up on how Twitter search works, let's look at some of the ways you can use Twitter search:

1) Finding people. Know some people you'd like to follow on Twitter but you're not sure what their Twitter handle is? Drop their name in the search box.

2) Hashtags. The easiest way to join a conversation on Twitter is by following a specific hashtag. Live chats will have their own hashtag that is used on tweets during the chat. You can also join on-going conversations about topics in your niche by following specific hashtags e.g. #BookMarketing or #AmWriting (two of my favourites).

3) Keep track of people talking about your website. Not everyone who shares links from your website will @ tag you to let you know. By doing a search for your website url you can easily find any tweets that include your url. You can then reach out and thank the person for their support.

4) Find mentions of your name. Again not everyone who talks about you will @ tag you. They might just write your name.

5) Get ideas. When you're working on a new blog post, or writing a book, creating a webinar, etc... use Twitter search to find out the types of questions people are asking about your topic.

This should help get you started but you can find more ideas for how to use Twitter search in this article by Zapier at https://zapier.com/blog/25-ways-to-use-twitter-advanced-search/

How do you use Twitter search? Be sure to share in the comments below!

Get more Twitter tips in my best selling book How to be Twittertastic

P.S. Don't forget to follow me at https://twitter.com/jolinsdell ;)